I was challenged a few weeks ago, by some of my cobloggers to attempt a Hallmark movie-type romance … and weirdly enough they came up with a couple of suggestions for plot points … and it began to seem like a fun idea. I’ve wrapped up the Luna City chronicles for now, and perhaps it might be fun to try something like this. The Lone Star Sons stories started the same way … with a bit of a dare, that seemed like it would be fun…

Chapter 1 – Bad Things in Threes

“I’m so sorry, Miss Robertson,” said the kindly vet-tech, “But there’s nothing that we can do for Pookie. The tumor that was removed two years ago appears to have metastasized. I think it’s time. You can see that he’s suffering…”

“But he’s purring!” I replied, with tears rolling down my face. “He’ll be fine … he’s purring, can’t you hear him?”

“Some cats purr even when they are stressed,” the vet-tech replied – and she was still kind, but firm. “He’s almost sixteen years old, too frail to survive another round of surgery. He’s had a good run, and a happy life … haven’t you boy?” she added and lightly ruffled the fur between Pookie’s ears. Then she looked at me and added, “Don’t torture him, Miss Robertson. Don’t torture yourself.”

“Just call me Caro – short for Carole,” I gulped.

“I thought your voice sounded familiar,” she replied, calm and resolute. “I listen to that show you are on all the time. Look, we’ll do our best for Pookie … but you really ought to think about this.” Older woman, about Mom’s age. She was wearing a surgical smock made of fabric with a pattern of little kittens on it, and a name tag that read “Susan”. I thought she must be an animal lover … well, you’d almost have to be, working in a veterinary practice.

This was an emergency pet clinic on a Tuesday evening. Pookie’s regular vet had referred me to them and provided them with enough of his recent medical records. I had called them almost the instant I walked into the condo and discovered Pookie just lying on the bedroom floor. Not in his basket. Not in his favorite perch in the tall cat tree. I was just coming home from a long weekend with my … well, Ray and I were supposed to be engaged. I had a ring, and everything, but Ray and I hadn’t managed to set a date. There never seemed to be a good time. Ray had his career, too – he was on a senator’s staff, and it always seemed as if there was one darned thing after another with both of our jobs.

Anyway, we had finally managed to scrounge some time away, over a long weekend. We just returned from staying at Ray’s family vacation house at the shore. I had sort of hoped that maybe this time, we’d have the time to talk and maybe make definite plans for a wedding … but Ray never seemed to be in the right mood. Still, it was a nice break from work. We ate fresh sea food, walked by the shore, skipped stones over the waves, waded in the surf – did all the things that vacationing couples are supposed to do.

Ray dropped me off at my condo on Potomac Street and drove off – parking is an absolute nightmare in Georgetown.  I walked in, dumped my suitcase on the bed … and there was Pookie. Not moving. Just lying there, as limp as if he were a scrap of fur, like the little stole that Granny May wore to church when I was a child, which looked like a live critter. My heart went into my throat the instant I saw him. Pookie gave a little sort of chirrup when he saw me, but he didn’t move. I saw with horror that the food in the automatic dispenser hadn’t been touched during the three days that I had been away, Pookie hadn’t touched a single bite of the expensive nutritional cat food for elderly felines, all the days that Ray and I were out at the coast. The bowl was overflowing.  Of course, I instantly felt horribly guilty about leaving Pookie alone for three days, although there was no real reason why; he had food, and water, and an automatic-cleaning litterbox that all but looked after itself. Pookie was an independent cat. He had the run of my condo and only lived for me and hiding in empty Amazon boxes, like all cats do. Normally, I would have gone to work that evening, at NPR’s affiliate station, but this was an emergency. I called my boss at the station and begged for an extension to my days off work. Called the veterinarian’s service. Called Ray’s cellphone and left a message when he didn’t pick up immediately. Finally called Uber for a ride to the emergency clinic.

Pookie was too important to me, too dear – he simply had to live. I had him since college, when he was a tiny orphan kitten that I had raised by hand after finding him behind the dining hall dumpster. (I never knew if there were other kittens, even though I looked for them at the time.) I had smuggled him into my dorm room, smuggled him into my first apartment, paid extra pet rent. Hauled him across the country, going job to job, to job as a researcher, and now-and-again on-air radio reporter. Pookie was the constant in my life, my only constant. Now he lay in my arms; my dear, fluffy grey long-haired Persian with his intelligent green eyes, as green as peridots, but under the thick fur he was all bone. Like a handful of sticks.

Susan the kind vet-tech was right.

“OK,” I gulped. “If you think that would be best.”

“I’ll go away for five minutes and let you think about it.” Susan offered – I swear, I think she was about to cry, too, but I could barely see for tears. I shook my head.

“No … do what you have to do. Just promise that he won’t suffer.”

“He won’t feel a thing,” she said. “We’ll administer a strong sedative first, and you can hold him until it takes effect. He’ll just go to sleep.”

She told me to look away, though – while she quickly shaved down a patch of fur from one front paw and set a needle for an intravenous drip. I held him in my arms – and I swear that he was still purring, even as I dribbled tears all over his sweet, furry head.

I was crying so hard when it was finally over. Susan handed me a wad of Kleenex. I signed the papers that she put in front of me, arranged for Pookie’s body to be cremated and the ashes sent to me – they even offered a choice of tiny urns. I just pointed at one, at random, and stumbled out of the clinic.

It was night outside – nearly ten o’clock, although the city street where the vet emergency clinic was almost a busy as it would have been in the middle of the working day.

But this is Washington, DC – they say that New York is a city that doesn’t sleep, but it’s the same in Washington, especially with the new administration in office. There’s too much going on.

I didn’t want to go back to the condo; a place that would really be empty now. I couldn’t face the overflowing cat feeder, the empty basket, the cat tree with the perch on it that Pookie loved. I would have to get rid of them soon. But I couldn’t stand to think of that finality. Couldn’t bear the thought of going to work. Didn’t want to be alone. I fumbled with my cellphone and called Ray again. Still no answer – I left a message.

Ray, this is Caro – I’ve just had to let them put Pookie to sleep. You know how much he meant to me. Do you mind if I come over now? I can’t seem to stop crying. Right now, I think I need to be with someone who loves me. See you in a few,

The Uber driver showed up within five minutes – a nice guy, and an animal lover, too. I think his name was Charlie, although I’d have to check my cellphone app to be certain. He was nice and considerate, and told me all about his own favorite childhood dog, so I didn’t have to talk. He dropped me in front of Ray’s narrow late Victorian townhouse on Fairmont, saying,

“Look, Miss Robertson – I’ll wait for five minutes, until you get safe inside. Lotsa low-lives hanging around Columbia Heights, sometimes. And I’ll close out this ride, but if he’s not home, I’ll stick around – just call and set up a ride back to Georgetown.”

“Sure,” I told him – and I was kind of touched for the gallant human consideration. You don’t see that often in the big city. I got out my key and trotted up the flight of steps which traversed a patch of lawn the size of a pocket handkerchief. If course I had a key to his place. We were back and forth all the time. I let myself in. The hallway light was on. I went halfway up the stairs to the second floor. I could hear the bedroom TV on and a woman talking, and there was a little bit of mellow golden light spilling into the upper hallway

“Ray, sweetie? Are you still up? I … didn’t you get my messages? I called because when I got home Pookie was so sick…”

Ray appeared in the doorway to the bedroom. Suddenly the place was dead silent, but for the whisper of the air conditioning unit. His place was small, old-fashioned, with tiny rooms and a narrow hallway on both floors from front to back. About the size of a small yawn, Granny May used to say of a dinky little house. He clutched a bathrobe around him – but I could see he was mostly naked underneath.

“Caro … I thought you were going in to work tonight.” He stammered. I froze on the stairs, exactly where I was.

Why did Ray look so nervous, sweaty? As if he had been …

“Ray, honey – who is it?”

A woman’s voice. Not the TV. She was there in the doorway behind him, a curvy dark silhouette against the light inside.

Georgia … I forgot her last name. But I’d recognize those breasts of hers anywhere. She worked with Ray in the same senatorial staff office. We’d met socially a couple of times. A striking redhead with big boobs. I always thought they were too big to be genuine. After all, size-nothing women don’t naturally sprout a pair the size of cantaloupes. I remembered joking about her and her gargantuan boobs to Ray. He had laughed and agreed with me … but I guess that he was enthralled with them after all.

“Caro … I know what you’re thinking and it’s not what …”

“I guess you do, Ray,” I finally found my own voice. “You want to tell me that this isn’t what it looks like? Tough luck, pal. I do know what it looks like. Don’t insult my intelligence or my eyesight by pretending otherwise. Oh, and here’s your ring … and your house key.”

I wrenched the ring off my finger and tossed it after the key. I guess they landed someplace in the downstairs hall with a faint tinkling sound. Well, he and Georgia Big-Boobs would have the fun of searching for them. I didn’t care. When I marched down the stairs to the front door, I slammed it with all my strength. It was a heavy, old-fashioned wood door, and I think the whole row of houses shivered.

Charles the gallant Uber driver was, as he promised, still waiting outside. It hadn’t even been five minutes. He was able to take the shortest way home, and this time, he didn’t talk much. I was grateful for that.

The third bad thing had the decency to not happen until the end of that week. That was when I decided to take the offered buy-out to my contract, and go back to Alder Grove, Texas.

If space opera science fiction is to your taste and interest, I had an advance reader copy for Sarah Hoyt’s latest. It is a truth universally acknowledged that just about every writer has a juvenile book hidden away someplace. A tale scribbled in their youth for fun, or because a story, a situation or a character obsessed them. Often it’s a kind of fan-fiction, or as I think of it – a training wheels book. Sometimes the basic concept and perhaps some elements are worth taking out and making something substantial and adult out of them, which is what Sarah Hoyt did with the epic space opera-fantasy No Man’s Land. The genesis of the basic story came about when she was a teenager, read Ursula LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness and had serious doubts about how a totally hermaphrodite world would work. The teenage version of this may be the epic story that she spun to amuse and enthrall her fellow high students back in the day. The world of the planet Elly is a complicated one, not least because of being peopled – personed – settled – whatever, by a race of genetically engineered hermaphrodites, who can impregnant and be pregnant. Which does make for exceedingly bizarre familial relationships, as we binary humans understand them. The Ellyians can also teleport, among other interesting and seemingly magical talents. As one can imagine, this leads to a very curious society, complicated by the fact that the spaceship which brought them to the planet also went back in time thousands of years in relation to the civilization which sent them, and others out to the stars. A lot of this is not infodumped upon the reader in one fell swoop, but rather noted in passing, and left to the reader to put together.

There are two complicated and entwined stories in No Man’s Land – and two main characters carrying the narrative, along with scores of minor but essential characters. The first we meet is Skip, Viscount Webson (whose formal name and title is about half a paragraph long in itself) the very young but official envoy from a galactic empire with very strict rules about its’ various operatives interacting with those societies deemed not quite ready for relations (of any kind, official or un-) with the star-spanning empire. Skip has problems and past trauma of his own. The second main character is Erlen Troz, who also has had sufficient past and present horrific trauma, being on the run from unnamed assassins. Erlen was not just a high official of what passes for a central government on a neo-barbaric world, but also the romantic partner of the late ruler, and quasi-parent of the heir apparent … and what with one thing and another, there is treachery afoot in both their worlds. So, who sent the assassins to kill the former king, murdered an investigator from Skip’s government, is still hunting Erlen, and the new king, and is it the same party as those still trying to kill or disgrace Skip? Who can they trust, and where can they turn for help? It’s a long and episodic adventure, through a very alien but well-fleshed out world. This is a narrative of characters and a society, not so much a close examination of the technologies involved in a futuristic tale. By the end of it, a lot of elements were tied together, things which had developed gradually all through the narrative; not all, of course – life isn’t that tidy. It is a long, long book – the pre-release version which I read came in three parts – but it did engage and held my interest all the way through.

Much to my own surprise, I am all but done with the draft of the next book in the historical YA series – the Kettering Family saga. The sequel to West Towards the Sunset is all but finished, just a post-script chapter to finish, and to assemble some historical notes to wrap up an account of young Jon Ketterings’ experiences in the early days of the California Gold Rush and it will all be ready for beta readers to have a go. (Seriously – anyone with special deep knowledge of the early days of the Gold Rush want to have a go? Send me a comment, and I’ll arrange for a PDF.) My notion for writing a family saga covering over twenty or thirty years of events in the occasionally very wild west while keeping the protagonist as a tween, or young teen came as an inspiration – follow sequential children in the family as they start to take an interest in events and things around them. So this is Jon’s turn – as a lively 9-12 year-old boy, who as it has turned out – is slightly dyslexic, and disinclined to be enthusiastic towards anything resembling formal education. This quality does not present so much of a difficulty for his family in the 1840s as it would in this present day. The Kettering parents just quietly conclude that he is not one meant for scholarship and allow him the space to turn his interests in more practical directions. Which, as this is set in California in 1848-49 offered considerable scope to have him experience in some well-known aspects and some more obscure ones, witness some interesting events and make friends with at least one person who would later become very, very well known. (There will be perhaps three or four more adventures, taking the Kettering family up through the Civil War and slightly afterwards.)

So – that’s the current situation. Wee Jamie, the Wonder Grandson starts preschool next month. I will not nearly be tied as tightly to a 4-year-olds rigid schedule and needs, which will offer a bit more time for writing and other things. August looms up, along with a couple of book events and fairs, and we will be preparing for them. I might even be able to finish off the final Luna City installation (which is half-written out in draft), and start on the Hallmark Holiday Movie style Blue Collar Romance, suggested by my fellow bloggers.